On the black cube that has begun to batter the buildings of the Vespucci embankment in Florence since this summer, the only clarifications, for the moment, should be asked of the Soprintendenza: it will be necessary to know why, at least for the moment, the result of the reconstruction of the former Teatro Comunale appears so different from the renderings that presented it to us, of course, still thundering above Corso Italia, but clad in warm, golden tones, less impactful than the dull, black box that s’rises arrogantly behind the gabled windows and pietra serena pilasters of the palace that once belonged to the Demidoffs and hosted ÄŒajkovsky and Tolstoy. But this is not the most interesting aspect of the matter, nor is it the most important one, although it is the one on which it is easiest to express oneself (and to be indignant: after all, today the two verbs have become almost synonymous).
First: it is not surprising that the City Council (and, it may be worth pointing out, the issue of the former Municipal Theater has seen three different administrations take turns, although all of the same sign) has operated in the wake of that economicist model of city management that has imposed throughout Italy since at least the 1990s, and has then experienced frequent acceleration since the subprime crisis onwards, not to mention that, in the specific case of Florence, the space for an idea of a city that revolved around the public assets of the historic center and their potential could only shrink in the face of the realization that the Tuscan capital is (or has become) one of the most tourist-oriented cities in the world. The urban planner Ilaria Agostini explained it well: “The city’s role in cultural tourism-which is growing rapidly on a planetary scale-opens it [...] to scenes of strong attractiveness to international economic actors. Holding companies are not slow to burst onto the scene with overbearance. [...] In a city in which history is put to income, the ancient center thus becomes a gold mine, a pure abstraction of bricks and mortar.”
Second: the fact that the controversy focuses more on “how” than on “what” is an indication that, fundamentally, on “what” the citizenry has little to object to, since the gradual process of privatization of public space that has been going on in Florence for years (that of the former Municipal Theater is but one of the many alienations that have taken place in recent years, between municipal and state-owned ones: in the list of the most conspicuous alienations it will suffice to recall the former barracks of Costa San Giorgio, which was also discussed on these pages, Palazzo Vivarelli Colonna, theformer hospital of San Gallo, the convent of Monte Oliveto), hand in hand with a type of gentrification that is less conspicuous but equally impactful on the social fabric of the city, namely that of small landowners who have sold or put into income the houses they had in the center or in the neighborhoods closest to the center and have chosen to move out of the city. To get an idea of the phenomenon, one could observe, even superficially, the trend of property listings recorded in the database of Immobiliare.it: in a semicentral neighborhood such as Isolotto, the average price per square meter has risen (aided, of course, also by the opening of the tramway, which has made it easier to connect with the center, benefiting residents but also and perhaps especially tourists) from €2,821 in April 2017 to €3,697 in July 2025. It means that today anyone who wants to buy a hundred-square-meter apartment in the area is required to shell out almost €100,000 more for the same property than eight years ago. The same appreciation is also observed in other areas of Florence, from more central areas such as Porta al Prato (4,250 versus 3,146) to more peripheral areas such as Careggi (3,974 versus 3,004).
Of course, it is difficult to hold venality against a landlord, especially at a time when the short-term rental market is becoming decidedly more profitable than the long-term rental market for residents: it would be like scolding a cat for its territoriality. And then, evidently, no one has ever been interested in trying to curb this phenomenon: on the one hand, a significant portion of the citizenry has found itself in the position of being able to make significant profits from an asset in its possession without even having the pressing need to frequent the historic center anymore because services have progressively moved out (raise your hand if you know a Florentine who for his daily needs needs to go downtown: the very case of the former Teatro Comunale, replaced with the newly built Teatro del Maggio, near the Parco delle Cascine, with ample parking in the immediate vicinity and easy accessibility, attached to the Porta al Prato station, is a more than exemplary case) or, as everywhere else, have been digitized, and on the other hand, everyone has almost unanimously welcomed this’ambiguous, insidious ideology of redevelopmentism, let’s call it, convinced that the continual redevelopment of heritage (“regeneration,” one would say in neo-language) would bring unquestionable economic benefits, that the handing over of large portions of the city to private individuals who invested mostly in high-end receptivity was a form of restitution, and that the continual transformation of urban areas should be interpreted as a sign of development. But if this is the perception, it is difficult to recognize the side effects: the transformation of the social fabric (by now probably irreversible, if not by multi-decade processes), the displacement of historical residents, homogenization, the cultivation of tourism as the main source of income (without, however, noticing the further damage within the damage: profound economic vulnerability, low levels of innovativeness and productivity, large shares of low-skilled labor). In the end, it is a win-win contract that everyone accepted in exchange for a more beautiful, more modern, more pleasant smart city. And the affair of the former Teatro Comunale is but a consequence, which no one would have talked about if only the new construction had been a few meters lower (demolishing it, as many Florentines commenting on social media would like, will perhaps serve to save the profile of the Lungarno Vespucci, but it would be a completely irrelevant action on structural processes). It would then perhaps be more interesting to understand whether the origins of this transformation of the city are to be found in an inevitable historical-social-economic process (and in the case there would be little to blame on anyone) or in the initiation, now in an era that we can consider historical, of a precise city project that has always gone in a precise direction. This is not so much to be able to change the direction of the process, but rather to see whether other cities where this process is further behind Florence, but symptoms of it can already be felt (read under Bologna, for example), are headed for the same fate.
Third: there is an entire Florentine intellectual class that has not opened its mouth on the issue, but even the indignation with the corpse of the former Teatro Comunale now overgrown and forgotten does not surprise all that much, given that in theera of social media it is not only politicians who have realized that the search for consensus based on the day after tomorrow as the farthest horizon is the most profitable activity in which to invest their energies. What’s the point of risking self-exclusion from public debate and self-condemnation to cultural irrelevance by talking about an international joint venture taking over the former Teatro Comunale di Firenze from Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (when the bulk of your audience probably doesn’t even know of theexistence of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) if you can get consensus, editorials, and guest appearances here and there by merely commenting on the divers faits of the day, even the dumbest and most irrelevant ones but which have wide appeal to the public that spends hours of its free time soliciting itself on Instagram and company, or by offering your views on the world’s highest systems? Let’s be serious: how many readers can care about the relationship between the city and its real estate capital? Who wants to open a debate on a complex issue? Better to comment on what guarantees immediate audience. Then, occasionally, it happens that someone remembers that in Florence they have put up a cube of glass and concrete behind the palaces that Giovanni Signorini painted when Florence was administered by Leopold II of Lorraine, but just enough time to gather some easy consensus, since anyone is capable of expressing displeasure if the topic is a construction that has the same effect on the surrounding landscape as a Tyson right on an accountant’s nose, after which, for the next seventeen years (i.e., the length of time between the change of use of the former Municipal Theater and the controversy over the impact of the new construction), any new discussions can safely pass by in passing if they are not deemed sufficiently engaging. But, again: does anyone feel up to reprimanding the intellectual who is desperately trying to avoid marginalization in a world that forces him or her to make a living from visibility and keeping in mind that even the intellectual has bills to pay?
And then perhaps we won’t even need the appropriate clarifications, we won’t need to ask the property to remedy with a less impactful construction, we won’t need to point out that the rendering was different: let’s keep the black box where it is, a monument to redevelopment, a symbol of the new city we all helped build. Meanwhile, it is still layering, it is the city going up (and it has gone up in everything, including prices). And then, a hundred or two hundred years from now, if the cube is still standing, it can be considered one of the most important testimonies of Florence’s history, on a par with Brunelleschi’s dome (assuming they haven’t knocked it down yet to regenerate it, of course: you never know), an allegory of the era when the city of Arnolfo di Cambio and Leon Battista Alberti had become an amusement park.
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